The distinction between the tough-minded and
tender-minded temperaments is at
the heart of the distinction between empiricism and rationalism:

[I]n
philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms
‘rationalist’ and ‘empiricist,’ ‘empiricist’ meaning your lover of facts in all
their crude variety, ‘rationalist’ meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal
principles (276-77).[1]

Each temperament represents one side of a “present
dilemma in philosophy” (a dilemma is a forced choice between two bad
options). The dilemma is a choice between science and religion.

On James’s view, pragmatism can help bridge the gap
between these two different ways of thinking about the world.

You want a
system that will combine both things, the scientific loyalty to facts and
willingness to take account of them, the spirit of adaptation and
accommodation, in short, but also the old confidence in human values and the
resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type.[3]
And this is then your dilemma: you find the two parts of your quaesitum [the
object of your quest] hopelessly separated. You find empiricism with inhumanism
and irreligion; or else you find a rationalistic philosophy that indeed may
call itself religious, but that keeps out of all definite touch with concrete
facts and joys and sorrows (282).

Recall that in “Some Consequences,” Peirce had urged
that our philosophical inquiry must begin with the beliefs and doubts that
we actually do already have. This suggests that philosophy is not an
activity that is isolated from the rest of our lives. You are the same
person when philosophizing that you are when you engage in other, more mundane
activities.

James is taking a similar position. The student he
describes in the following passage had understood philosophy to be something
very different than what Peirce hoped for:

I wish
that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed
me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly that I am sorry I
cannot read them to you now. This young man, who was a graduate of some Western
college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you
entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe
entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street.The
two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you
could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world
of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous
beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which
your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The
contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles
of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and
dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a
hill. (282-283)

As an example of this, he cites GottfriedLeibniz’s
doctrine that “God has chosenthe best of all possible worlds”.[4]

James’s point is that you could only find this
philosophical doctrine plausible if you completely divorced your philosophical
inquiry from every other aspect of your life. If you look and see how the
world actually is, you will find a lot of misery and terrible things…
obviously, it is not the best of all possible worlds.

It is at this point that my
own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a
philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious like
the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve
the richest intimacy with facts (284).

We will see over the course of the next two readings how
James thinks pragmatism can go between the horns of the present dilemma in
philosophy and thus provide an approach to philosophy that is friendly
to our religious impulses while at the same time taking account of the results
of the sciences.

[3.2.] “What Pragmatism Means” (1907).

This is the second “lecture” (chapter) from James’s book Pragmatism:
A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.

In the first lecture (“The Present Dilemma in Philosophy”),
James took the position that pragmatism is a way between the horns of a
philosophical dilemma: the choice between the empiricistic tough-minded
temperament and the rationalistictender-minded temperament.

In this second lecture, we find out that James’s
pragmatism may not go exactly between those two horns; it is closer to
one of the horns than to the other…

James views pragmatism as carrying on the tradition of empiricism:

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in
philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me,
both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it
has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist
turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate [old,
long-established] habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from
abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori
reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and
origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards
action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant [ruling,
dominant] and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open
air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the
pretence of finality in truth (293).[5]

James’s pragmatism a “radical” form of empiricism in that it
takes seriously theological ideas that the traditional empiricist would dismiss,
e.g., the idea of God as “the Absolute”. (James considers this way of thinking
about God, which is called absolute idealism, at the end of “What
Pragmatism Means”.)

In his first description of the method, he alludes to some
of the philosophical disputes in which the tough-minded and the tender-minded
take different positions:

The pragmatic method is
primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be
interminable. Is the world one [monism (tender)] or many
[pluralism (tough)]?—fated [fatalism (tough)] or
free [belief in free will (tender)]?—material [materialism (tough)] or spiritual [spiritualism or theism (tender)]?—here are notions either
of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions
are unending. The pragmatic method in
such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective
practical consequences.What
difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that
notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then
the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical
difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right (291,
emphasis added).

This is what he seems to have in mind: If there is a
conflict or disagreement about which of two (metaphysical) beliefs is true,
then we should “trace the practical consequences” of each of the beliefs:

·if they have different practical consequences, then we
should be able to see which consequences actually happen and which do not; this
will settle the conflict.

·if the two beliefs have the same practical
consequences, then they mean the same thing and there is really no
conflict between them.

A case of different practical consequences: the squirrel.
Suppose a man to be chasing a squirrel around a tree but never catches a
glimpse of it because the squirrel keeps the tree directly between itself and
the man at all times. The beliefs that are in conflict are: “The man is going
around the squirrel” and “The man is not going around the squirrel.” Which
belief is correct depends on the practical consequences involved. Once we start
thinking in terms of practical consequences, we will see that “going around” is
ambiguous:

·If we mean that the man is first to the north, then to the east,
then to the south, then to the west, then to the north (again) of the squirrel,
then the man IS going around the squirrel.

·But if we mean that the man is first in front of, then to the
right of, then behind, then to the left of, then (again) in front of the
squirrel, then the man IS NOT going around the squirrel—the man is in front
of the squirrel the entire time (the squirrel is facing the man the entire
time), even as they both move around the tree.

In this example, the Pragmatic Method shows that the same
words (“going around”) can have different meanings.

A case of no difference in practical consequences:
tautomerous bodies.WilhelmOstwald (1853-1932, winner of
the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), a German chemist, cites a dispute involving
“tautomerous bodies.”

·One theory of such bodies says that there is an unstable hydrogen
atom oscillating inside them.

·Another theory says that such a body is an unstable mixture of
two types of stuff.

According to Ostwald, since the two theories have exactly
the same implications for experimental results, there is no real dispute
between them—they are really saying the same thing, just in different language.
James quotes Ostwald:

“[The
controversy] would never have begun,” says Ostwald, “if the combatants had
asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made
different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have
appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as
unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by
yeast, one party should have invoked a ‘brownie,’[6]
while another insisted on an ‘elf’ as the true cause of the phenomenon” (292).

In this example, the Pragmatic Method shows that
different words (the two proposed explanations of tautomerous bodies) can have the
same meaning.

[3.2.2.] Pragmatic Method vs. Pragmatic Maxim.

There is an important difference between James’s
Pragmatic Method and Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim:

·Peirce held that the result of applying the Pragmatic Maxim to
an idea (e.g., to the idea of hardness, or truth, or reality)
is another idea, viz. our ideas about actions that can be
performed with objects of the original idea and about the sensible effects that
would result from those actions.[7]

James’s emphasis on actual, concrete actions is
explicit in this passage:

There
can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference
elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a
difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed
on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of
philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you
and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that
world-formula be the true one (293, emphasis added).

We will soon see how this difference will tend to push
James away from the realism that Peirce presupposed and toward a view that is
closer to relativism.

Stopping point for Monday February
9. For next time, begin reading “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” (pp.309-15)—your
third response paper, on this reading, is due at the beginning of class.

Heads up: your first exam in this
class is on Wednesday February 25.

[1]
James was not the first to recognize these different philosophical tendencies.
For example, Kant wrote of “the very different ways of thinking among students
of nature; some of whom (who are chiefly speculative) are hostile to
differences in kind, while others (chiefly empirical minds) constantly seek to
split nature into so much manifoldness that one would almost have to give up
the hope of judging its appearances according to general principles” (Critique
of Pure Reason, trans. Guyer and Wood, A655/B683).

[2]On his view, these two types of personality
are typically antagonistic toward each other: “The tough think of the
tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be
unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that
that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of
Cripple Creek.[2]
Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one
case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear” (278-79).

[3]
Here “romantic” does not connote romantic love; it is meant in the literary
sense and so means something like: “marked by the imaginative
or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or
idealized”. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/romantic
.

[4]
Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and
the Origin of Evil.

[5]One aspect of the tough-minded personality is an
attraction to fallibilism. In “The Will to Believe” (ch.10 of your
textbook), James distinguished between two ways of believing in truth: the empiricist
way (fallibilism) and the absolutist way (infallibilism). It is
not too much of a stretch to associate the empiricist view of truth with
empiricism and the absolutist view with rationalism, although there is nothing
about empiricism in itself that requires that empiricists be fallibilists, and
nothing about rationalism in itself that requires that rationalists be
infallibilists.

[6]
In Scottish mythology, a brownie is a spirit that haunts houses, especially
farmhouses.

[7]For the most part, James describes Peirce’s
views correctly. But in the first sentence in the quoted passage, James
seems to miss the distinction between the idea of conduct (and its
effects) and the conduct itself (and the effects themselves).

... Mr.
Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said
that, to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is
fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the
tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is
that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible
difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an
object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical
kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what
reactions we must prepare. Our conception of these effects, whether immediate
or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as
that conception has positive significance at all (291, emphasis added).